Terrarium Portal, or Terrarium Commmunity? Should we help Mitch out?
The Terrarium has been touted as a developer community game. So far, Microsoft has been responsible for maintaining every aspect of it, even though they've given out the necessary items for the developer community to step in and take over. To date there are very few Terrarium Server's and most people still use the base MS server. I think it is time for the developer community to step in and really help out with this project. There is no reason for MS to do all of the work on this great sample.
So, should we help Mitch out? He posted about changing the way the portal works on his blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/mitchw/archive/2004/02/03/66905.aspx. I say we take it to the next level. Here is what I have and my release plans, let me know what you think.
Terrarium Community Server - The Terrarium Community Server is peer server network. Anyone can set up a new Terrarium Community Server and then subscribe to other servers via a basic RSS scheme. The more community servers that get installed the more sharing can happen. So what can be shared? Well, admin news can be shared, the code gallery is fully shareable, add in the skin gallery, and then more basic things like links to existing terrarium servers and terrarium based websites. All of this information is built up dynamically after being shared between other sites, so when you install, you already have content on your site without doing any work.
Terrarium Proxy - This is the coolest thing since sliced bread. Once the Terrarium source is released, a new config dialog and the ability to specify a connection port doing registering will need to be added. Once this is done, an admin can run the Terrarium Proxy on a publicly facing computer, and then everyone from behind the firewall can connect to the proxy using a real-time connection and the Terrarium Proxy will register your peer on the actual Terrarium Server. This will enable large groups of people that can't play outside of their corporate networks the ability to interact in the global EcoSystem.
This is just the start guys. I have lots of other code saved up and planned for the future, but eventually I'm going to need some help. I'll start by cleaning up the above two pieces of code so they can be released. The Community Server should be ready to launch as soon as the Terrarium Source Release is out, and the Terrarium Proxy will release about 2-4 weeks after the Terrarium Source Release so I have time to debug things.